Customer.io vs. Marketo: Unleash automation without hidden costs 

Back in the day, marketing was all art, with very little science. You could build a thoughtful strategy and put out carefully crafted messaging, but you never really knew what drove customers to choose your brand.

Now, brands have a data and messaging powerhouse: the marketing automation platform (MAP). An effective MAP is the nucleus of your martech stack—it allows you to personalize and send targeted messages at scale.

But how do you choose the right MAP for your business? Many boast hefty price tags, clunky user interfaces, and limitations that require adding even more tools to your stack.

In this article, we’ll compare Customer.io Journeys, a modern, purpose-built MAP, to Marketo Engage, one of the old standbys in the MAP game. We’ll compare pricing structures, feature sets, and user interfaces between the two. By the end, you’ll see why Journeys is the best option for those looking to build and scale their marketing automation strategies with ease.

Marketo Engage is part of the Adobe ecosystem. It was initially launched as a lead management and email automation tool in 2006 and acquired by Adobe in 2018. One of the first MAPs to hit the market, Marketo strongly focuses on account-based marketing. It integrates closely with the Adobe ecosystem, including Marketo Measure (their enterprise marketing attribution tool), Adobe Real-Time CDP (their customer data platform), and offers native CRM integrations with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

Marketo Engage solutions are designed primarily for midsized and enterprise B2B organizations with large databases, high-volume lead generation, and sales use cases. Marketo is one of the most well-known MAP options but also one of the most expensive. It has four base pricing packages, but all pricing is custom, and official numbers can only be gathered through the sales team. Pricing scales with database size and many features are only available as add-ons with additional fees.

Journeys is a customer engagement platform for sophisticated lifecycle marketing and multi-channel campaign execution—for both B2B and B2C businesses of all sizes. It empowers you to create personalized customer experiences using email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging. Designed to scale with your business, Journeys pricing is straightforward, with no hidden fees.

Journeys plans include Data Pipelines, our CDP, so you don’t need to purchase separate tools to leverage both data and activation. Unlike other MAPs that lock you into their ecosystems, Journeys gives you the flexibility to build a martech stack tailored to your business, ensuring maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

Journeys and Marketo represent two very different approaches to what a MAP can do and how it does it.

Marketo was initially created as an email-first platform, with built-in automation for large-scale sales and lead generation. Over time, it’s expanded to include additional channels, like push and in-app communications, or native data integrations with platforms like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Those additional capabilities, however, come with add-on costs.

On the other hand, Journeys was designed with omnichannel in mind—with no limitations or extra costs for critical features like push, in-app, SMS, automation, data, or reporting.

Both platforms have their areas of strength, alongside a lot of overlapping capabilities, to consider.

It’s common for SaaS products to have limits at various pricing tiers, be it seats, API calls, features, etc. However, depending on your goals, those constraints can get in the way of executing your strategy effectively. Before selecting the right tool for you, it’s essential to understand where these limitations lie.

All Journeys plans have unlimited user seats, segments, attribute storage, events, event segments, workflow triggers, non-email sends, data warehouse syncs, and the entire reporting and analytics suite. Monthly email sends start at 1 million, and all customers get unlimited push, in-app, and SMS sends.

By eliminating limits on crucial features, Journeys enables marketers to tap into the full power of messaging automation. Using all your customer data, you can create automation as simple or complex as you wish.

Conversely, Marketo has limitations on user seats, API calls, custom objects, and custom fields based on plan type and pricing tier. You’re limited to 100 active engagement programs (Marketo’s term for marketing initiatives) and 100 active segments (how the platform groups people based on specified criteria).

With these restrictions, brands may be unable to perform the level of advanced automation they need without upgrading to a much more expensive plan. Marketo customers also face challenges moving audience members into/out of segmentations (how Marketo organizes their segments) and triggering messages based on their actions. Plus, the cumbersome structure of engagement programs and Smart Campaigns makes managing multiple workflows at once tricky.

If you want to engage customers, you must go where they are—and that’s increasingly beyond their email inboxes. These days, omnichannel marketing is table stakes. A practical MAP must enable you to reach your audience across several communication channels—and at scale.

Journeys is a true omnichannel MAP, with email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging in one cohesive platform. You can create intricate campaigns that include all these message types—with as many steps, branches, and triggers as you like.

The visual workflow builder makes it easy to create campaigns with as much complexity as you need without getting lost in the details. You can customize every trigger, object, and action to achieve your messaging goals.

When creating messages themselves, Journeys balances ease of use with total control. Drag-and-drop editors for email and in-app messages allow you to design engaging content without coding, and you’ll find a template library to make in-app messages quick and easy to spin up. And if you want to get into the code, you can leverage Parcel, an email development platform that streamlines email creation and collaboration.

Marketo offers email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging automation, but non-email channels are add-ons and not included in Marketo's base pricing. Implementing your multi-channel strategy with Marketo comes with a steep pricing curve and requires much more effort.

Marketo constructs complex campaigns using its proprietary engagement programs feature. Functionally, engagement programs work more like a series of lists. Instead of a visual workflow builder, you create cadences of content “streams” with if/then rules to transition your leads. This often requires significant expertise and engineering support to develop elaborate workflows. And without an intuitive and visual, drag-and-drop interface, it can be challenging to set campaigns up properly or see how they flow.

Despite being an email-first platform, Marketo’s email builder can be frustrating, with limited design capabilities and a clunky interface—most customers use a supplement tool to build their emails and other messages. The need for third-party messaging tools and technical resources for implementation and maintenance adds to the high overall cost associated with using Marketo.

For many brands, a MAP is the backbone of their marketing and messaging strategy. While it may make sense to devote significant budget to such an important tool, things can go off the rails if add-on charges for overages and extra features result in surprise bills. When you know what your MAP budget will be every month, you can execute any strategy with confidence.

Journeys is rooted in data-driven, personalized, cross-channel customer experiences. All the features needed to enable those experiences are built into its core functionality and come without any limits or additional cost: SMS, push notifications, in-app messages, webhooks, segments, profile attributes, and user seats. Pricing is designed to give you predictable costs, with all-inclusive plans and nominal extra charges if you need extra profiles, email sends, API calls, or custom object profiles.

Journeys has three straightforward pricing plans:

• Essentials: This plan is designed for small companies on the rise, starting at $100/month. It includes 5,000 audience profiles, 1 million monthly email sends, 500 object profiles, and two object types.
• Premium: Starting at $1,000/month, the Premium plan is best for fast-growing companies. This plan offers more audience profiles, email volume, and object profiles and types. Premium customers also get 90-day onboarding support, plus compliance options.
• Enterprise: The Enterprise plan is for large companies that want to scale globally. Pricing is customized to fit your unique business needs and includes extra support options like migration assistance and a dedicated customer success manager.

There’s even a Startup program featuring a free year of messaging and data integration for companies that have raised less than $2 million in funding.

See the full Journeys pricing breakdown >>

Marketo’s pricing plans can be complicated and confusing. The actual costs are not publicly available—you must talk to a sales rep. There are four overarching tiers and a host of add-on features to choose from.

• Growth: This tier includes up to 50,000 marketing contacts. Support consists of base-level onboarding and consulting alongside an extensive resource library. Attribution and ROI dashboards are not included in this pricing tier but can be purchased as an add-on.
• Select: In addition to the Growth tier features, the Select pricing tier includes access to the attribution toolkit, AI-powered personalization, and the ability to create up to 10 custom data objects.
• Prime: The Prime tier includes everything in Select plus journey analytics, targeted account management, and predictive audiences. This plan also includes the opportunity to purchase advanced performance analytics as an add-on, which is unavailable in the Growth and Select plans.
• Ultimate: The Ultimate plan is Marketo's highest tier. It includes everything in the other tiers plus a discounted rate on Marketo Measure, a tool for ad data and behavioral analytics.

Marketo’s tiers have usage caps for many features and separate service plans for technical and strategic needs. SMS and push notifications are also add-on costs, alongside a host of sales tools, web personalization tools, sandboxes, and advanced analytics. Altogether, it can be hard to know beforehand what your final price will be in any given month.

When choosing the right MAP for your business, you must consider your current strategy and goals and how you hope to grow in the future.

Marketo may be one of the most well-known MAPs on the market, but it has a high barrier to entry: a long learning curve, frequent need for engineering resources, and hard-to-predict costs. On the other hand, Journeys is designed for maximum flexibility and control without extra hurdles. Its clear pricing, intuitive interface, and cross-channel capabilities make it easy to start and scale.

Want to take Journeys for a test drive? Sign up for a 14-day free trial—put it through the paces and see how it can transform your marketing automation!